Inequality in America today is twice as bad as in ancient Rome, worse than it was in Tsarist Russia, Gilded Age America, modern Egypt, Tunisia or Yemen, many banana republics in Latin America, and worse than slaveholding societies in 1774 colonial America.

Lest we forget, extreme inequality helped cause the Great Depression, the current financial crisis … and the fall of the Roman Empire.

Bad government policy – which favors the fatcats at the expense of the average American – is largely responsible for our runaway inequality.

A who’s-who of prominent economists in government and academia have now said that runaway inequality harms economic growth, including:

Deputy Division Chief of the Modeling Unit in the Research Department of the IMF, Michael Kumhof

Former executive director of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, senior policy analyst in the White House Office of Policy Development, and deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the Treasury Department, Bruce Bartlett